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Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem! Can anyone translate? For context: It was written on the wall of a stable by a young and in debt S. T. Coleridge while serving in the 15th Light Dragoons as a stable hand, having failed to secure a much-needed scholarship, having been expelled from Cambridge, having failed to win the Irish lottery. (In pursuit of this last mad hope he had even beseeched an unsympathetic Lady Fortune in a poem published in a London newspaper).
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The miserrimum looks funny, but if you make it Eheu! quam infortunii miserum est fuisse felicem! it comes out something like 'Alas, happiness is as possible as misery for the unfortunate.' Perhaps Nuncle Z can set us straight.
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here's a (looser) translation, which at least seems to make a little more sense, to me:
"Alas how much the worst part of misfortune it is to have once been happy."
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Meanwhile, Hydra, I am tsking at your double genitive. I mean, I like an apostrophe as much as the next greengrocer, but.
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Meanwhile, Hydra, I am tsking at your double genitive. I mean, I like an apostrophe as much as the next greengrocer, but. "of Coleridge's"? Ain' nothin' wrong with that.
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Thank you Faldage and tsuwm.
AnnaStrophic, what?
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The miserrimum looks funnyIt's the superlative form of miser 'wretched, miserable, unhappy'. tsuwm's already done the heavy lifting. According to none footnote (in Google Books), it's an allusion to Boethius: in omni adversitate fortunae, infelicissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem. ("In every reverse of fortune, the most unhappy condition of misfortune is to have known happiness", link)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Thanks again fellas.
I've since done a little reading on that double-genitive plaint of yours, AnnaStrophic.
Quite the prescriptivist, aren't we?
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Thanks again fellas.
I've since done a little reading on that double-genitive plaint of yours, AnnaStrophic.
Quite the prescriptivist, aren't we?
Oh, yeah. and apparently still ignorant enough not to have realized that dry wit silly humor and double-cross-threading (yes! two hyphens!!) need at least a smiley to signal intent. 
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